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by bluGill 51 days ago
If you are not in the field, consensus is often almost impossible to figure out. Remember what gets published is things that are controversial. Thus, things that have consensus are things that are going to be silent in literature if you search for it. Thus, if you're searching for something, you may not actually find the consensus if you're looking, and so the study is hard when you're not already an expert.
2 comments
jibal 48 days ago
This is quite false and the opposite of what is actually true. Textbooks and other teaching materials are entirely based on consensus science, surveys report on consensus, meta-analyses identify consensus, the abstracts of novel studies lay out the consensus that they are reconfirming, adding to, or challenging. Your statements about "what gets published" and "things that are going to be silent" are completely nonsensical and have no relationship with reality. There isn't a single field where there is a consensus where I can't immediately find out what it is.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus

"Scientific consensus is the collective judgment, position, and opinion of the vast majority of active, qualified experts on a conclusion in a specific scientific discipline.[1] Scientific consensus results from the self-correcting scientific process of peer review, replication of the event through the scientific method, scholarly debate, meta-analysis, and publication of high-quality review articles, monographs, or guidelines in reputable books and journals to establish facts and durable knowledge about the topic."

The whole point of that publication is to make the "durable knowledge" accessible.

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thaumasiotes 50 days ago
> Thus, things that have consensus are things that are going to be silent in literature if you search for it.

Not really; generally consensus ideas will be mentioned in passing while discussing something else. You can get a strong sense of the consensus that way.

For example, I bought several textbooks on early Mesopotamian history, which taught me that Marxism enjoys a strong consensus in that field. And it's not even relevant to the field!

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